Scottish government forced to cut £392m from public spending plans under EU rules

The Scottish government has been forced to cut £392m from public spending plans after the Office for National Statistics ruled that the level of government control over a major PFI project meant that keeping it off the books breached EU rules.

The move follows last year's ONS ruling that the Scottish government's £1.45bn Aberdeen bypass wasn't really a private finance project under EU law because of the level of control the Scottish government retained over it. They have been forced to put that spending on the books and have preemptively moved two new hospitals and new headquarters for the Scottish blood transfusion service onto the books for this year leaving a £392m black hole in the Scottish government's finances.

Despite campaigning against PFI in Scotland, the SNP has extended the PFI scheme there. They've called it NPD instead of PFI but it's the same thing. To balance the books the Scottish government are having to postpone uncommitted grants and use contingency money to cover spending.

The Scottish government have also been warned that planned legislation to allow them to hide PFI liabilities for its social housing programme will likely fall foul of the same EU rules.

Economy grows for 14th consecutive quarter

To the disappointment of Remain campaigners, the UK economy grew by 0.6% in the last quarter.

The Office for National Statistics made the surprise announcement today, driving the FTSE 250 past the level it was prior to the EU referendum last month and pushing the FTSE 100 up to a 12 month high.

Despite the scaremongering during the referendum campaign and the continued scaremongering that is still happening more than a month later, the UK economy has continued to grow. The predicted temporary dip in the stock market turned out not to be the global economic apocalypse predicted by George Osborne and the economic "experts" drafted in by Project Fear after all and was just, as expected, a temporary blip.

A new £35m trade agreement has been signed with the US which will see imports of British beef and lamb resumed and at least 10 countries - including China, India and Japan - have committed to negotiating new trade deals with the UK. One of Project Fear's corporate propagandists, GlaxoSmithKline, has announced a £275m investment in the UK today despite threatening to pull out of the country if we voted to leave the EU. Research by Pitchbook for London & Partners has found that $200m of venture capital has been pumped into UK startups since the EU referendum and Chinese property developers are ramping up investment in the UK thanks to the weaker pound. Siemens warned before the referendum that it would cancel a £310m wind turbine operation that would employ 1,000 people if we voted to leave but has decided that it wants the billions of pounds of business it will generate after all and the world's largest telecoms equipment manufacturer, Huawei, is investing £1.32bn in the UK. McDonalds also announced further investment in the UK today with 5,000 new jobs to be created by the end of next year.

It's funny that the more positive news there is about the economy, the quieter the Remainiacs get.

Government report confirms ONS has been covering up more than 50% of immigration

We've been saying for some time that the Office of National Statistics' EU immigration figures are wrong and today the British government released a report that confirms it.

The ONS said that net EU immigration last year was 257,000 people. They said that in 2014 it was 223,000 people. Actually, it was more like 474,000 people. That's not slightly out, they under-reported EU immigration by more than half and they did it deliberately.

The true EU immigration figures were known but to cover them up the ONS left out the people who moved here for less than 12 months. Whether they live here for 6 months or 60 years, their children still go to school, they need medical care, they use the roads, etc. They count no matter how long they're living here for.

EU immigration is out of control and the number is increasing year on year. Not only are the number of EU immigrants increasing, the number out of work and claiming benefits is also increasing. While we're in the EU we can't control immigration, the safe option is to vote to leave.

UKSA instructs ONS to review its flawed immigration statistics

The UK Statistics Authority have told the Office for National Statistics to review the way they estimate immigration figures after figures were obtained in February that showed more than double the number of National Insurance numbers were issued to EU immigrants last year than the number of EU immigrants that the ONS said came to live here.

There is no routine checking of who comes into or leaves the country so ONS figures are estimated based on a survey of a few thousand people at ports. The ONS said that last year EU immigration was 257,000 people but the HMRC issued 630,000 National Insurance numbers to EU immigrants for the same period. Even if half those National Insurance numbers were issued to EU immigrants already living here who had spontaneously decided to start working and paying tax, every newly arrived EU immigrant would have had to be an adult registering to pay tax and it would still leave 58k NI numbers unaccounted for. The numbers just don't add up and by such an enormous margin that there is either benefit fraud on an unprecedented industrial scale or the ONS methodology is so fundamentally flawed that their statistics are no more accurate than rolling a dice and adding a few zeroes.

Immigration up, unemployment up ... do the maths

The Office for National Statistics has published some pretty gloomy unemployment figures today.

Unemployment rose in the UK in the final quarter of last year by 118,000, leaving 2.685m people out of work.  Unemployment rose slightly in Scotland but decreased in Wales and Northern Ireland.  Clearly the devolved governments have a better handle on unemployment than the British government.

The media all have some pretty extensive coverage of the news and the BBC ironically quotes an "expert" from RBS - which has been sacking people in England and moving jobs to Scotland - saying that it's not going to get better any time soon.

Nobody seems to be drawing a correlation between the rise in unemployment and the fact that net immigration last year was 227,000.  Assuming three quarters of those immigrants were, or should, be seeking active employment (given that a large proportion of immigrants don't come with 3 generations of benefit-seeking hangers on as the Daily Mail would like you to believe) that's 170,000 people looking for jobs over and above the two and a half million people that already live here who are also looking for jobs.

It's clearly unsustainable yet only UKIP has a policy that will deal with the problem - ban economic immigration for 5 years and then allow limited immigration with a points-based system to ensure we only get sustainable immigration and the skills we need.